Martin's the name, languages are the game (sorry). Seriously, I love languages for languages' sake (as opposed to learning them for a particular purpose) and always have done. I'd probably have a reasonable command of most of the languages below if I weren't so lazy...

And are you planning to learn every national language of Europe or something?

Yes, "fas" is Farsi. Using the ISO 639-3 codes was the only way to fit them all on.

No, I'm not planning to learn them all - Spanish has never really interested me, for instance (to be honest, I'm not all that keen on French, really). Nor am I bothered about learning every Slavic language, although I suppose learning Czech would open up Slovak.

Talib wrote:Fair enough. I'm just curious why you have so many European languages and then Japanese and Farsi.

I suppose the European bias is due to my being European, although of course Hungarian and Estonian aren't Indo-European, while Farsi is. I'm interested in Farsi mainly because of the importance of Persia/Iran in world history, but also because I want to explore the similarities (and differences) between it and other IE languages. I wouldn't mind learning Quechua and Mandarin one day, but for the moment they aren't even on the radar.

engless wrote:Swedish is quite easy if you already know English and German, but it's easy to get bogged down with Japanese.

A Finn once told me that about Swedish. As for Japanese, I'm not expecting an easy ride - I just find it (so far) a wonderfully succinct language (depending on how polite you're being) and, of course, the writing system is beautiful, if a tad cumbersome.